1. Ease of use for non technical folks (my dad in the post)
2. The dangers of having an exposed ssh port (even on non standard ports)
I just don't have the time or compute to constantly tweak my security settings for a publicly exposed port, so the easiest way to solve the problem is to not have the port publicly exposed
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It is not fully disabled, my dads account has a password for sftp.
Its covered more in part 1 (linked at the start of the blog post) but the repeated attempts at ssh'ing into my server actually killed sshd (which is how I found out about it).
The other problem is that this "server" is hosted on a residential connection in my computer room. This is just something I don't want to deal with and using a VPN fixes that since I do not need to deal with it, and its easy enough for my dad to use